Do you find the world a fascinating place? How many worlds are there out there? There are so many amazing things going on in the world, so many facts to learn and so many mysteries to solve. So join my Worlds of Fascination for a articles on everything from the profound to the trivial, the odd to the mysterious.

Sunday, 11 December 2011

Superman is possibly the best known and most iconic action
comic superhero of our time, and this bullet-proof hero from the planet Krypton
dressed in his distinctive bright blue and red costume has appeared in many films,
TV shows, action comics, books and on a huge array of Superman
merchandise. The accepted story is that
Superman was created by two shy and friendless high school students to make some
money and help them to get girlfriends, but could the true story of Superman’s
creation be a lot darker than that?
Could the character of Superman have been created because a young
teenage boy had lost his father in shocking and tragic circumstances, causing
him to create a fantasy world where good always prevails over evil and where
there is an indestructible Man of Steel who will fly to your aid at your time
of peril? Did this young, grieving boy wish that his father had been
bullet-proof and that one day there would be justice done for a horrendous
crime?

Superman

Superman was the creation of two teenagers called Jerry
Siegel and Joe Shuster, and was destined to be the first of the celebrated American
comic book superheroes. Jerry Siegel was
born in 1914 and was the youngest son of Mitchell Siegel, a Lithuanian
immigrant who had opened a clothing and haberdashery store in Cleveland. Jerry
was a shy child, who was not good at making friends, and whose greatest love
was drawing. His father Mitchell
encouraged his son’s artistic talent, but on one tragic night in 1932 the young
teenager’s life would be changed forever.
On the 2nd June in 1932 Mitchell Siegel’s store was robbed at
around 8.30 in the evening. During the
course of the robbery Siegel slumped to the floor and died; the robbers fleeing
and they were never being brought to justice.
The Siegel family and the coroner stated that Mitchell had died of a
heart attack, but police reports stated that gunshots had been reported during
the robbery. So had Mitchell Siegel
really been murdered by being shot to death, and if so, why the cover up and why
was there no murder enquiry?

Whether this was a murder or a tragic natural death brought
on by the robbery, the impact on the shy teenager Jerry Siegel who loved and
admired his father must have been devastating.
Also the fact that nobody was ever arrested for the robbery must have
seemed highly unjust to the idealistic teenager, who would have naturally
wanted justice for his father and to see his assailants brought to trial. But was this tragic event the catalyst for the
creation of the bullet-proof superhero whose mission was to destroy evil so
that justice could be done and good prevail?
It could be said that making Superman bullet-proof was a way of admitting
to the world that he knew that his father had really been shot to death,
although we will never really know. Did Spiegel wish that his father had been
bullet-proof and invincible, and that there had been a superhero that could
swoop down from the skies to protect his father from being killed and destroy
the evil villains, restoring justice to the world?

Immediately after his father’s death Jerry and Joe Shuster
seemed to be driven to create a comic book world where there was a strong sense
of good and evil, and where there would always be a superhero on hand that
fought tirelessly for good and justice for the wronged. Was this because the young Siegel could not
believe that there would be any real justice for his dead father in this world?
Which then led him to create a world of his own where his father’s death would
have been avenged? The character of Superman also had other correlations with
the young Jerry Spiegel’s life, as Superman had also lost his family, his
familiar home environment and was an outsider in a strange land. As well as
having to deal with the loss of his father, Jerry had to cope with being bullied at school, where he was shy, had no
interests other than reading magazines and books, and did not excel
academically. Practically the only friend he had made at high school was Joe
Shuster, who was his collaborator on the comic book strips, and Shuster was a
shy and introverted character like himself. In fact, they were so similar that
both he and Shuster had to repeat their final year of High School. Ironically,
even though many of the characters they would go on to create would be
physically strong with superhuman abilities, Spiegel was also not much of an
athlete or team sport player, and displayed none of his action comic characters
physical prowess.

Since his early childhood years, the young Siegel had been a
huge fan of comic strips, films and science fiction pulp magazines. His career started around 1929, when Jerry
published a SF fanzine called Cosmic Stories, which he had created on a manual
typewriter and advertised in the classified section of the Science Wonder
Stories. He was active over the next few
years and produced several other comic strips and magazines. After he met Joe
Shuster they would both spend hours, day and night, creating their comic strip
stories and action heroes, to the detriment of their education and social
lives. The creative duo broke into comics when they made their debut with Henri
Duval, a swashbuckling musketeer and the supernatural crime fighter Dr Occult
in the publication New Fun.

However, the character of Superman did not make his
appearance until just after Mitchell Siegel’s tragic death, when the younger
Siegel and Shuster unveiled a bald villain with telepathic powers whose mission
was to dominate the world, that they called ‘The Superman’. This version of the
character did not take off, and after a sleepless night spent tossing and
turning, Spiegel came up with the idea for the Superman character that we are now
all familiar with. However it would take years for them to find a publisher for
their new comic strip character, Superman, and after one more rejection by
Consolidated Book Publishing, Shuster was so enraged that he burned all the
Superman material. Siegel managed to save the front cover from the flames, and
in 1938 the publisher of Action Comics decided to use an illustration of
Superman lifting a car with his bare hands as a cover for his new action comic. He contacted Spiegel and Shuster and asked
them to create a 13 page Superman story for Action Comics#1 and the legend of
Superman was born. By the time that
ActionComics#4 hit the newsstands, the comic was selling in huge numbers and
all because Superman was featured in its pages.

You might think that
this would have been a turning point in the lives of Jerry Spiegel and Joe
Shuster, and that their futures were destined to be rosy from then on. However, misfortune never seemed to be
lurking too far away from the talented pair. When Superman had been first
published in Action Comics in June 1938, they sold all the rights to Superman
for only $130 and a contract to supply ongoing Superman material to the
publishers. DC Comics were making a
fortune from publishing Superman, but the creators Spiegel and Shuster were
still being paid relatively little for their work. They eventually got so
frustrated with the situation that they sued DC Comics in 1946. They were
promptly fired and the fight went on until in 1948 they accepted $200,000 to
sign away all the rights to Superman and any character that was a spin off from
Superman, and their names were even removed from the Superman byline. It wasn’t
until newspaper reports began to surface in the 1970s of the duo’s impoverished
circumstances, that Warner Communications, who were not happy about the bad PR
they were receiving, started giving Spiegel and Shuster a $35,000 annual
pension and health care benefits. Also they ensured that any material they
produced containing the Superman character had to contain the credit ‘Superman
created by Jerry Spiegel and Joe Shuster’.

So was Superman really created because a teenage boy had
lost his father in a tragic and shocking way, and who wished that his father
could have been bullet-proof and have a superhero to save him? It is unlikely
that we will never find out what was really going on in their minds as Joe
Shuster passed away in 1992 and Jerry Spiegel in 1996 and during his life Jerry
never once mentioned the Cleveland robbery that led to his father’s death in an
interview.

Thursday, 8 December 2011

Have you ever heard of the Staffordshire Hoard, the amazing
Anglo-Saxon gold and silver treasure found by a lone man with a metal detector
in an English field? Many of us have
been brought up on tales of buried treasure and maps where X marks the spot, so
the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard must have seemed like a dream come
true to that lucky treasure hunter. Finding an ancient treasure or chest full of
gold coins may seem like a bit of a pipe dream, but it is one that many people
hope to fulfil as they scour the countryside with their metal detectors hoping
to strike it rich. But just as many lottery winners have discovered to their
cost, hitting the jackpot and finding a unique, golden treasure does not always
lead to happiness ever after and can even cause the people involved to regret
ever having been part of their remarkable discovery. So was finding the
Staffordshire Hoard a wonderful, life-changing event for those involved or
merely the precursor to arguing, bitterness and remorse?

The Finding of the Staffordshire Hoard

Back in 2009 Terry Herbert was just an amateur metal
detector enthusiast, who was living on disability allowance in a council flat.
He had found some small archaeological artefacts in the past, but could have
had no idea of was he was about to unearth in a muddy field near Lichfield in
Staffordshire. For what he pulled out of the mud that day in Fred Johnson’s
field were the very first pieces of what would turn out to be a fabulous
Anglo-Saxon treasure, comprising of over 1500 items in gold and silver, some
studded with precious stones that dated from the 7th century AD. Most
of the precious objects were associated with warfare, such as parts of
decorated helmets, sword pommels, and hilt collars. There were also three gold
crosses discovered that had had the arms folded inwards, possibly so that they
would not take up so much space when they were buried. Mr Herbert reported his
amazing find to the local authorities and Birmingham archaeology undertook the
full archaeological excavation between July and August 2009.

So What is the Staffordshire Hoard?

The items recovered
in the Staffordshire Hoard are of the most superb craftsmanship and show what
expert metal workers the Anglo Saxons were. The huge quantities of gold and
silver found also shows that these were once the possessions of very high
status individuals, possibly even royalty. One of the more interesting facts is
that none of the objects found would have belonged to women; they were all
parts of the trappings of an Anglo-Saxon warrior, which had been ripped off the
original swords and helmets. There has
been fierce debate as to how this collection of treasure was originally
accumulated and why, but it has been suggested that they are trophies collected
from vanquished warriors after a battle, or that the gold and silver
embellishments had been removed so that the sword blades or metal helmets could
then be redecorated to reflect the new owner’s identity. Also there have been various reasons put
forward as to why the Staffordshire Hoard was buried in that field, ranging
from the treasure being an offering to a pagan god to the artefacts being
hastily concealed due to protect them from being pillaged during a battle.

Who Were The Anglo-Saxons?

The Anglo-Saxons were a group of Germanic tribesmen that
invaded the south and east of England during the early 5th century
AD. This period of British history is usually known as the Dark Ages, a time
from which there are very few surviving written records and it used to be
thought that any culture had fled the country with the retreating Romans and
that the invading Anglo-Saxons were merely blood-thirsty savages. However, some
of the archaeological finds from this period, such as the Sutton Hoo burial and
now the Staffordshire Hoard, show that the Anglo-Saxons were exceptionally
skilled at working precious metals, setting them with garnet gemstones. The
field where the Staffordshire Hoard was found was in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of
Mercia, ruled by warrior kings such as Aethelred, Penda and Wulfhere. During
the 7th century AD Mercia was trying to expand its territory and
influence and was being militarily aggressive, so the booty of the
Staffordshire Hoard could easily have been stripped from bodies on the
battlefield. The Staffordshire Hoard also shows that at that time, Anglo-Saxon
Britain was in transition from being a pagan country to a Christian one, as
some of the objects show a mix between being decorated with pagan or Christian
symbols.

Valuing the Staffordshire Hoard

The Staffordshire Hoard was valued by the Independent
Treasure Valuation Committee at the British Museum at £3.28 million. This small
fortune was divided equally between the farmer who owned the field, Fred
Johnson, and the man who had made the discovery with his metal detector, Terry
Herbert. You would have thought that becoming millionaires overnight would have
been a cause for celebration, but instead it appears to have led to a souring
of relations and bitter recriminations between these two men. The relationship
has even deteriorated to the point where Mr Johnson has banned Terry Herbert
from ever setting foot on his land again. It seems that both men have expressed
regret that they ever had any part in discovering the Staffordshire Hoard. Fred
Johnson has stated in the media that he believes that Terry Herbert is just a greedy,
grasping man and that he has been incensed by Mr Johnson’s desire to search for
more treasure on the farm. Mr Johnson says that he was never interested in
gaining money from the find and was only ever interested in protecting the find
for the country, and also that he did not welcome any of the publicity or media
interest. Mr Herbert has riposted by saying that Fred Johnson was just unhappy
that he had to share any of the payout and that he wanted to keep all the money
for himself. So despite the fact that Fred Johnson has been able to build
himself a new house on his farm and that Terry Herbert has moved from his
council flat to a luxury bungalow, their new found wealth does not seem to have
brought either man very much happiness or peace of mind.

So maybe we should all be a bit more careful of what we wish
for, as even something as fabulous as discovering a buried hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure can bring stress and unhappiness with it. But perhaps the most
important thing to have come out of all this is the Staffordshire Hoard itself. This fascinating piece of Anglo-Saxon history is now housed in several museums
in the UK, including the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Potteries
Museum and the British Museum, where visitors can wonder at their beauty and
experts can continue to examine them and discover more about their history, how
they were made and fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon
history.

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About Me

Writer, blogger and hypnotherapist.
Author of the Aten Sequence Books - science fantasy books for young adults set in Ancient Egypt. The first in the series, Pharaoh's Gold, is now available to download at Amazon